


Personal Item

by rageprufrock



Series: Hindsight [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-24
Updated: 2011-09-24
Packaged: 2017-10-24 00:32:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I PROMISE NOT TO GET SHOT AGAIN <3 <3 <3</p>
            </blockquote>





	Personal Item

DO U UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF STAKEOUT

Rodney scowled at his cell phone and, elbowing the microwave door shut, he wandered toward the living room, mumbling under his breath as he speed-typed with one thumb.

OH, THAT’S FANTASTIC. LIKE TXTMSGING GIVES YOU AN EXCUSE TO BE TOTALLY GRAMMATICALLY INCORRECT. I JUST WANTED TO SEE IF YOU WERE OKAY.

He spread out across the couch, tugging down the afghan his sister had sent as a “Congratulations, you’re a real person! If you drive him away, I will  _kill you_ ” gift. Tucking his feet in, he stared morosely into the fire, slurping at his reheated coffee. The only thing that sucked worse than reliving a childhood freezing his nuts off in Canada was doing it while mooning after stupid, suicidal FBI agents on lonely Saturday nights.

U USED TXT 2 I AM FINE GO TO SLEEP JESUS

That almost,  _almost_  propelled Rodney to do the irresponsible thing and start calling John at 31-second intervals, a move that was both diabolically evil and irrepressibly annoying. But while John had been reluctant—“If you ask me one more time, I am going to drive this car into a ditch,”—to reveal his location and purpose for the evening, Rodney knew calling him would rise beyond stupid and into ‘dangerous.’

Rodney had never managed to shake the nauseating sense of anxiety every time John said, “Oh, yeah, we’re doing a bust tonight,” or “But it was only a few armed robbers,” or “It wasn’t a really  _big_  meth lab or anything,” like it was okay since it was only five people with rifles who’d tried to take him out.

And then, unexpectedly, his phone buzzed again where he’d set it in the crook of his arm, and Rodney picked it up to see:

I PROMISE NOT TO GET SHOT AGAIN <3 <3 <3

Rodney put a pillow over his face and moaned. Sometimes, it hurt to think this guy was his medical proxy.

 ****

 *****

At half past four in the morning he got an emergency page from the mountain and dragged himself out of bed and into the car, after bumbling around the kitchen to leave John a note. Muttering vile imprecations under his breath the entire time, Rodney went through three separate security checks before entering the NORAD base—taking a quick left, and getting on the elevator for SL28.

“What?” he moaned, stumbling into his lab. “ _For the love of God, what?_ ”

Sam, looking revoltingly awake at this revolting hour of morning, only grinned and said, “It’s good to see you, too, McKay.”

“Did I say it was good to see you?” he snarled. “It’s  _horrible_  to see you. It’s  _disgusting_  to see you. Do you know  _what time it is?_ ”

He collapsed face-first into a lab table and tried to remind himself why he had signed on for this project to begin with—but an embarrassing number of those reasons had been correlated with a hot, feisty blonde. None of which, he thought ruefully, are technically relevant anymore.

“I’m actually starting to miss the totally infatuated version of you,” Sam joked.

Rodney lifted his head blearily. “Really?” he asked.

“No,” Sam revised quickly, eyes widening. “McKay!”

“I was just joking,” Rodney griped, yawning and rubbing his face. “Look, why did you call me out here at oh-ass-crack-hundred?”

“They’re considering giving the Atlantis mission another go,” Sam said, her voice tight with excitement. “The international board in Switzerland just came down with a ‘maybe’ about an hour ago.”

She leaned forward on her elbows and grinned in Rodney’s face, all blue-eyes and thrill and promise, and five years ago Rodney would have given his left arm for her to look at him like that, for her to give him another run at the Lost City, for her to say:

“Come on, McKay. You and me should crack this thing in a heartbeat, right?”

 ****

 *****

Despite John’s understandably accusing statements, Rodney really  _hadn’t_  meant to break up with his girlfriend for him, nor cause the ensuing histrionics.

He’d meant it when he’d said, “You don’t have to wait for me,” even though the words had tasted like ashes on his tongue—and not only because he’d said them into the skin of John’s neck, into the quiet place between them.

He’d been selfish the only way he knew how any more: choosing science over romance. He’d gone to another galaxy only to come home to Colorado and sleep, finally untroubled, tied to the Earth in John’s arms.

But he knew he was luckier than he should have been to be able to creep back into his old life, to fill in all the gaping holes he’d left—a nearly seamless reappearance, John forgiving him for leaving at all.

 ****

 *****

After Sam’s, “What do you  _mean_  you have to think about it?” and “Okay, I told you before, he does not count as a personal item, McKay,” Rodney had excused himself to freak out in the privacy of his own home.

He did a lot of lying down and staring at the ceiling fan, lighting more wood on fire and gazing blindly into the fire, a lot of feeling sorry for himself and collapsing into bed, face mashed in the pillows. He woke up, murmuring in confusion a few hours later when he felt a rush of cold air, but he heard, “Shh—it’s just me. Go back to sleep,” and so Rodney did, pressing closer and deeper into the bed until his face was in somebody’s neck instead of the pillow, and slept, lips moving softly against a collarbone.

The next time he opened his eyes, sun was pouring into the room. The lazy Sunday morning light that melted across the bleached floor beams, and Rodney lifted his head left and right to see John still sacked out on the other side of the bed, hair flat in exhaustion.

Quick and furtive inspection—lifting the blankets and squinting the dim light—revealed no heinous injuries, so Rodney allowed himself to settle back in against his pillow and watch John rubbing at his face blearily, making pitiful whining noises in his sleep.

So Rodney smirked and eased out of bed in the shivering morning cold to make coffee and grab the newspaper (for John) and the laptop (for himself) and also some Oreos (breakfast of champions). And he was halfway through a modified research proposal for Atlantis that allowed for personal objects that were people when John made a honking noise, sneezed three times, and groaned, “This  _sucks_.”

Rodney smiled dimly and said, “Remember when we used to have sex in the mornings?”

“I just want to  _die_ ,” John moaned, turning over to burrow deeper into the covers, forehead pressed against Rodney’s side and continuing his symphony of pitiful noises. “It was raining like a mother _fucker_  last night.”

Frowning, Rodney glared down at John’s demoralized cowlick. “You were on stakeout—shouldn’t you have been in a car?”

“We were on a roof,” John said, sounding horribly wronged. “It rained on us all night.”

“You were text messaging me from a roof, in the rain?” Rodney asked, intrigued.

“Yes and yes,” John said, peering from beneath the covers with red eyes. “I want eggs,” he said pathetically. And blinking twice, as if thinking hard, he added, “And also French toast.”

“French toast made with Splenda,” Rodney said in revulsion, and John only continued to stare at him with a desperate, flushed, slightly sick expression. And then he sneezed again, whole body shaking, and Rodney nearly leapt from underneath the covers to avoid the spray radius.

“Eggs,” John muttered, putting his face under the covers again. “Toast.”

“And an exorcist,” Rodney snapped back, shivering and pulling a sweatshirt on, searching around the bedroom until he found a box of tissues, tucking them near the bump of John’s head. “Here—try not to get the plague all over the sheets,” he said, and he heard a muffled “thank you” from under a pillow.

He tried not to feel very much like anybody’s wife while he was making up a plate of eggs and French toast and steeping an enormous mug of hot mint tea to fill out the breakfast tray, but he knew it was kind of pointless. Rodney had realized a while back they were both kind of the wife, something which he regretted daily having shared with John, whose only response had been to grin and say, “Cool. We’re lesbians.”

By the time he got back into the bedroom John had propped himself up with all—literally all—of the pillows on the bed and had created a small mountain of tissues on the floor next to his side of the mattress.

“That’s disgusting,” Rodney hissed.

“Give me my fucking toast,” John growled, and made grabbing motions at the tea.

An hour later, after John had eaten his toast but only picked at his eggs and then rushed into the bathroom to puke everything up, Rodney went from “disgusted boyfriend” to “worried lover.”

He picked up all the tissues and pulled out an extra quilt to tuck in around John. He turned on his humidifier and brought in another mug of tea and took John’s temperature three times in distress—it stayed 102 despite the two-minute intervals—before he doused John in Dayquil and stroked his hair in concern.

“Hey, you feeling any better?” he asked, a few drowsy hours later, climbing under the covers again because the house felt cold and empty and lonely without John puttering around, looking at inappropriately gory crime scene photos at the kitchen table.

“I hate being sick,” John moaned, his arms and legs weak from illness, so Rodney took pity and rubbed his wrists, his ankles, pressed kisses to John’s temples—sweet things he only let himself get away with when John was too stoned on meds to notice. “I hate, hate, hate being sick,” he insisted.

“I sensed this,” Rodney said mildly, brushing John’s bangs off his sweaty forehead.

“Mercy killing,” John begged hoarsely. “That’s all I ask.”

“No dice,” Rodney said softly, and shifted until John rested his head on his favorite part of Rodney’s stomach and Rodney was propped up against some of John’s pillow fort, and he sat there on the bed in the late winter light and watched John sleep, flushed and troubled.

 ****

 *****

When Rodney woke up Monday morning to the faint light of his LED alarm, he brushed his fingers reflexively over John’s forehead—still too warm, too clammy—and reached for the handset on the nightstand. It turned out that John’s boss had been waiting for the call, saying somewhat sheepishly that Agent Carter was down for the count, too, and told Rodney John was free to take the rest of the week off for all he cared.

“Wait,” Rodney asked into the phone, glaring down at John’s tousled hair. “How much vacation time has John racked up, anyway?”

“Jesus,” Agent Brandeis said, long-suffering. “We stopped counting last year. I had to throw him out of the office once when he showed up with bronchitis.”

“I see,” Rodney said darkly, and hung up the phone. Of course, he’d always had his suspicions about John’s ability to take care of himself left to his own devices—every time Rodney started to get romantic notions otherwise, he reminded himself about hostage situations and depositing checks and John being  _shot_ —but now he had proof.

Rodney turned off the alarm just in time, before the red numbers of the digital clock on John’s side of the bed ticked over to 7:00 a.m. and put his head down on the pillow and frowned at the ceiling.

He was in the middle of trying to calculate the chances of John taking him back (again) if he left (again) and the chances of John finding another hospitable vagina (again) to comfort him after Rodney’s abandonment (again) when he heard John mumbling, waking up slow.

“I’m up,” John said, blurry. “I’m—up late.”

“I turned off your alarm,” Rodney supplied flatly, still staring at the ceiling. The thing was, he kind of  _lived here_. This was  _his ceiling_. They’d  _signed papers_ , and if Rodney got blown up or blew himself up or somebody else blew him up, they’d send his singed remains to this white clapboard house and John, who’d hate him forever with good reason.

“Why did you turn off my alarm?” John asked, sounding annoyed but making no move to get up. “It’s Monday. Mondays are for working.”

“Not when you have the plague,” Rodney argued, propping himself up on his elbows to scowl at John more effectively—which would have worked better if John still didn’t look so sullen and pitiful and deathly ill. “If I wasn’t here, you’d be at work already, wouldn’t you? You’d be slumped over your horrible desk spreading your horrible disease.”

“I don’t have the plague,” John tried, and then he tried to push himself up but got dizzy and fell back to his pillows. “Okay, give me a second.”

“You really would,” Rodney said in dawning horror. “Oh my God—you have no instinct for self-preservation at all.”

John gave him a strange look. “It’s a cold, Rodney.”

“Forget it,” Rodney snapped, suddenly furious with himself.

That was the other half of the equation he hadn’t really thought about the first time, hadn’t really been thinking about until now, that it wasn’t just about leaving and coming back and missing John in the interim or the after. It was that he’d be _leaving_  and John would be going to work right now, braving slick roads with a stuffed head and bleary eyes, and nobody would make him French toast with Splenda or check his temperature—it was that he’d be alone, and Rodney would have been the one to do it.

“I already called in sick for you,” Rodney went on, tucking John’s clammy arms back underneath the comforter and brushing sweaty bangs off of his forehead. “Your boss said that Carter was halfway through death’s door, too, and to take the rest of the week off.”

“Brandeis is a slacker,” John mumbled, eyes already slipping shut again.

“Brandeis isn’t an  _android_ ,” Rodney shot back, and got out of bed. “I’m going to make coffee and forage—don’t even think about moving.”

John didn’t answer, really, just made an indistinct mumbling noise and shuffled around beneath the sheets some more. As Rodney was listening to the coffee hiss and sputter and drip into the pot, that he thought he should herd John into the shower. The steam might help clear his chest and, and Rodney could take the opportunity to change the sheets; smooth new, cool cotton across the mattress and open the windows for a while, just to let in some fresh air. But it was when he was gathering up a tray full of vitamins and coffee and cough drops that he realized there was no way—he couldn’t do it—that when Rodney closed his eyes and felt longing to the marrow of his bones, it wasn’t for Atlantis and her rolling sea, but John.

“You’re going to be late for work, too,” John said later, leaning heavily on Rodney’s side.

“Doesn’t matter,” Rodney told him, stroking his fingers absently through John’s hair. “This is the only place I need to be.”

 ****

 *****

On Tuesday, Rodney went to work and said, “I’m not going.”

To say Sam was ‘angry’ was kind of a monstrous understatement.

She demanded that Rodney explain himself, told him how after two years of sulking to  _go_  to Atlantis and then 10 months of sulking when Atlantis had gone horribly wrong and then three  _more_  years of sulking to have had Atlantis snatched away, having a ‘change in priorities’ wasn’t an option.

“You forced my hand,” Rodney argued.

Sam threw up her hands in frustration. “People are not personal items! You cannot pack a person into a shipping crate!”

“John is very flexible!” Rodney shouted back. He’d learned long ago that knowing you sounded crazy wasn’t generally enough to stop you from doing it anyway. He waved his hands, trying to clear the air.

“Look,” he said, resigned and glaring at Sam’s flushed, furious expression, “the point is this: I left once and it nearly killed me on  _multiple_  levels—and if it were just me, I’d be there in a heartbeat.” He deflated. “But it’s not.”

And it was like Sam finally got it, like the switch had finally been flicked, like the nearly four years of her listening to Rodney drop very unsubtle comments about the hot piece he had waiting for him at home hadn’t really penetrated until this very moment. Her eyes got very blue, and she seemed almost…fond of him as she said:

“Oh, geez,  _McKay_.”

And  _then_  it was like  _Rodney_  finally got it, too. Like the switch had been flicked, like the nearly four years of his dropping unsubtle comments about the hot piece he had waiting for him at home hadn’t really penetrated his  _own_  skull until this very moment, and Rodney slumped onto a stool and put his face in his hands and said:

“Yeah. Oh, Jesus.  _Yeah_.”

 ****

 *****

It turned out John needed the full week to recover, and Rodney was glad he’d forced the point when on Wednesday John was still spending most of his day groggy and on the living room couch in his sweatpants and FBI softball tee.

“We should go flying together,” John said as Vince and Eric got into yet another homoerotic fight on their television screen.

Rodney rolled his eyes. “Just because I bought you the plane doesn’t mean I should have to watch you cheat on me with it,” he said, and frowning, asked: “How come we always end up watching this dreck?”

“I like Ari,” John said feebly, stuffing another baked onion ring into his mouth.

Rodney had finally capitulated and dug out the Cooking with Diabetes textbook John’s reversion to heterosexuality had brought into the house—it was hard not to twitch in fury at how happy John had been to see Rodney bring him onion rings.

“Of course you like Ari,” Rodney said bitterly, snatching one of the onion rings. “Why wouldn’t you be attracted to a verbally-abusive, power-hungry control freak?”

“I have no idea,” John sad dryly, and grinning, he redoubled his efforts: “Come on, Rodney. We should go flying. I’m good at it.”

“Like risk factors for my early demise aren’t high enough without you encouraging my death,” Rodney snapped, stealing another onion ring.

“It’ll be fun,” John said, leering. “We could put it on auto-pilot and I could blow you.”

Rodney choked. “Thank you. You may have just ruined blowjobs for me forever. They will be forever associated with dying in a hail of twisted metal and flaming steel now.”

“That’s too bad,” John murmured with intent, setting aside his plate and sliding one hand down Rodney’s chest. “Maybe I should see if I can’t change that association.”

Rodney said, “Well, if you must,” in a long-suffering sort of way, but he helped John with his pants because he was that kind of good boyfriend.

Five minutes and some really unsexy gasping and coughing later, Rodney was putting a cold compress on John’s forehead and turning the humidifier on high, saying in a constant, panicked voice, “Oh my God—of course, of course you’d try to cut off your only other intake source for oxygen before you could even breath out of your  _nose_.”

 ****

 *****

Rodney spent most of his days at work trying not to pay attention to preparations for Suicide Mission to Atlantis v. 2.0, but it was hard, and it got harder as the days crept by and Elizabeth kept giving him fond, understanding smiles and saying stuff like, “Rodney, you’re allowed to be in love.”

And sometimes the desire to say, “Fuck it, I’m coming. I’m coming—take me with you. I have to know,” was strong enough that Rodney had tried three separate times to get John to break up with him.

The first two times Rodney ended up sleeping on the sofa for a week before there was a lot of groveling and he got let back into the bedroom. The third time John didn’t even  _notice_ , just asked Rodney to pick up some toilet paper and Febreeze on his way home.

“I said,” Rodney had emphasized, “Sam Carter is a  _smoking babe_.”

“And don’t get the kind with colored designs on it,” John had continued blithely. “Seriously, Rodney—just plain white toilet paper.”

But every time Rodney had a fit of grief for having given this up, every time he was helplessly angry, he went straight to John and John’s comforting arms, curled up in their bed—so he knew he was making the right decision after all, even if it hurt like the worst sort of separation. He’d always known it’d come down, eventually, to choosing.

So somehow or another three months had dragged past and the expedition was scheduled for departure in the morning, armed with a ZedPM discovered in Egypt and a sort of grim optimism that was trademark SGC. Nobody was really surprised when he’d taken the week off to lie around his house and feel morose, but it gave John extra time to badger him and he finally capitulated in a fit of melancholy and foolishness, saying, “Sure. Fine. Why not?” and got in John’s God damned plane.

 ****

 *****

 ****

 **Epilogue**

“I  _told you_  you should have let me sneak him in for a—”

“Oh,  _Jesus_ , Rodney!” John snapped, blushing hard and trying to ignore the way everybody else in the room was staring at him gap-jawed and amazed, while he was holding something that looked like a deranged alien disco ball—lights flashing spastically. And when everybody kept staring, Rodney saw the exact moment John snapped. He slapped the Ancient toy onto the conference room table and snarled: “Somebody needs to tell me exactly what’s going on right now.”

John was taking care to glare at everybody in the room, which meant he was scowling at Rodney, General Landry, Dr. Jackson, Sam Carter, Elizabeth Weir, Carson Beckett, and General O’Neill—who’d been rousted out of sleep in D.C. and dragged into Colorado for an emergency meeting and was currently nodding off at the conference table. Rodney would have thought the entire thing was a snapshot out of an acid trip if he wasn’t so busy being smug and thrilled and not at all surprised by his astonishingly good taste in men that it was almost too much to bear.

“What’s happening is that  _you_  are the lynchpin to my life’s work,” Rodney said seriously, closing his hands over John’s and realizing with some surprise that apparently he could be  _more_  in love with John than he had been previously. “What’s happened,” Rodney added, feeling sort of choked up, “is that you’ve made me the happiest man on Earth.”

Glaring, John pulled his hands away. “I will kill you,” he said sincerely.

Elizabeth opened and closed her mouth twice before she said, haltingly, “I’m—this is difficult to explain, Mr. Sheppard.”

“Try me,” John snapped.

Rodney and Sam shared a look.

“Okay,” Rodney said after a beat. “I’m going to need fifteen minutes, a white board, and a PowerPoint projector.”

“And booze,” Sam added helpfully. “We’re going to need some liquor.”

“Somebody bring me a pillow,” O’Neill muttered, burying his face in his arms. “And wake me up when you morons wise up and get around to showing him the gateships.”

“Please,” Rodney scoffed, bustling around for a laptop. “He’s not that easy.”

 ****

 *****

 

 **Somewhat after the epilogue**

“We should rename them. Puddlejumpers,” John decided.

Rodney scowled. “They are ships,” he said. “They go through the gate.”

John made a dismissive noise. “It agrees with me; it thinks gateship is a stupid name.”

“You can’t hear what it’s saying! It’s not saying anything! It’s a nonsentient object! It does not have opinions on its name!” Rodney sputtered furiously, ignoring the bemused gazes of half his senior staff, buzzing around the gateroom, preparing for Possibly Less Suicidal Run to Atlantis v 2.1. He reached over to fuss with some of the straps on John’s tac vest only to have his hands slapped away. “Look, I’m just trying to make sure you’re gate ready.”

“Does it really matter if my vest is regulation?” John asked, rolling his eyes. “I’m going as a human light switch.”

He didn’t sound very bitter about it, which Rodney figured was because so far, John and the Ancient technology had communed on a deeply spiritual and emotional level that had Rodney feeling irrational fits of jealous rage toward inanimate, thousands of years-old objects. He’d spent a solid week glaring at the control chair in Antarctica.

“That’s what you think,” Rodney said. “Zelenka took one look at your background in mechanical engineering and started to make some really inappropriate noises.”

John rolled his eyes. “Sure, sure.”

Rodney figured John would realize the truth soon enough—his previous experiences on Atlantis had involved a lot of being forced to his feet at ungodly hours to fix things that had stopped working or started working or started turning people blue, and Rodney imagined that John had a lot of that due in his future. Anybody who knew how to use a Philips head had a lot of that in their future on Atlantis.

Over the intercom, a voice carried out:

“Chevron eight locked.”

Rodney felt John’s hand closing over his, secret and close and nervous, and Rodney squeezed John’s fingers. “Don’t worry,” he murmured, close to John’s ear as the wormhole opened and John sucked in a breath—still surprised by it, amazed by it, despite the soft missions he’d been sent on with SG-11, just to show him how it was done. “There’re puddlejumpers on the other side, too.”

John gave Rodney a look, part amusement and partly inscrutable, and said, “You don’t really think I’m going just to fly those things, do you?”

Rodney stared back, seeing the MALP go up the ramp and through the puddle from the corner of his eye, listening to the low crescendo of whispers and hum of anticipation in the room. He’d been honest with himself, before. He could be honest about John, now.

“No,” he admitted, feeling shy suddenly. “No.”

John rewarded him with a smile. “Good.” Pause. “But you know, they are a very close second.”

And then it was their turn, boots clattering on the creaking metal of the ramp. Rodney listened to John take a deep breath even as he closed his own eyes, and when they melted through the luminous blue of the puddle Rodney had a strange, sudden certainty that John was finally going home—somewhere he was tethered by more than gravity.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hindsight was the first substantial thing I wrote in SGA fandom, and in a lot of ways, still one of my favorite projects -- I remember having just posted it getting a lot of comments to the effect of, how did it happen? what will John do on Atlantis? and obviously, they nagged in the back of my mind. So I think that both this and the other sequel (More Than) should be read as the in-between stories, existing in the space between the end and the epilogue of the story. Again, many thanks goes to Zoetrope for pulling double beta duty and somehow knowing intuitively exactly what I meant, even when I didn't convey myself very well at all. — Pru (1/30/2007)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Personal Item](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3311033) by [Dr_Fumbles_McStupid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Fumbles_McStupid/pseuds/Dr_Fumbles_McStupid)




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